Wade Davis’s new books tell of Mallory’s death on Everest and his fears for the B.C. wilderness.

Ten years ago, when Wade Davis was 48, he was invited by resident friends in a remote Peruvian village to take part in a 20-hour tribal run that involved scaling several mountainsides and descending into deep jungle valleys as fast as his legs could carry him.

“I did it,” the trim, blond-haired author/anthropologist/filmmaker and National Geographic explorer-in-residence said during a recent interview in the Toronto office of Random House.

It has just published Into The Silence: The Great War, Mallory And The Conquest Of Everest, Davis’s massive, richly contextualized and minutely researched account of the ill-fated 1924 Mount Everest expedition, which cost intrepid British mountaineer, George Mallory, his life.

“I didn’t win the race, but I was the oldest man ever to run it, and, I think, the first outsider.”

Davis’ life is jam-packed with quests like this. A self-made star in the worlds of geography, botany and exploration, he has turned a myriad personal adventures into 15 thrilling books and more than 20 films.

The B.C. native spends summers with his family and friends in a sprawling rustic lodge in the rugged Stikine River region in the province’s north, and the rest of the year in his second home in Washington state, leading the kind of life most of us only dream about.

“Hemingway said the writer’s only obligation is to lead an interesting life and to tell the world about it. That’s what I’ve tried to do,” said Wade, who has two books on the go simultaneously: Into The Silence and The Sacred Headwaters: The Fight to Save the Stikine, Skeena and Nass (Greystone Books).

The latter is a densely packed, coffee-table sized collection of stunning photographs of the northern B.C. wilderness and First Nations residents, in which Davis gives a passionate and eloquent account of its inevitable ruin at the hands of mineral and fuel mining operations.

At $50, The Sacred Headwaters is an expensive protest pamphlet, Davis acknowledges, but the book has already gained enough attention to make publication worthwhile.

“It reached No. 8 on the Amazon.ca bestseller list even before it was published,” he said. “The book formalizes the campaign against the destruction of this beautiful wilderness, which just happens to back onto where I live. I’ll give them away for nothing if it helps spread the word.”

Davis’s first book, The Serpent and the Rainbow, was an account of his search, as a young anthropologist, for the roots of zombie culture in Haiti. It was written to buy his way out of a financial hole and was later turned into a Hollywood movie.

Davis hadn’t previously written about things he hasn’t actually experienced, before starting on the Mallory book 12 years ago.

“It’s the only book I’ve written that I’m not in,” he said. “But I’m no stranger to that part of the world: Nepal, Tibet, the Himalaya. I’ve been there on expeditions many times and have many good friends in those places.”

Davis calls himself an accidental writer who set out at any early age to find a way to use his peculiar set of scientific skills as a way of living.

“I found myself in Colombia at the age of 14, on a school trip, and I was mesmerized,” he said. “I love being adrift in cultures that aren’t my own. Most people don’t like changing their circumstances. I thrive on it.”

A few years later, with an advance for his zombie story outline “and some coca leaves,” Davis took an apartment in Virginia and taught himself to write.

“I never took a creative writing class in my life,” he said. “And although Into The Silence is by far the best thing I’ve written, I still think some of the passages in the Serpent and the Rainbow are pretty thrilling.”

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